I remember how some people done quarries in the 1.4-1.7 versions of Minecraft (I don't exactly remember which) by simply putting a chunk loader object from other mod and programming the robot to mine it. The robot had a diamond pickaxe and could drop and get items, so when the inventory were full, it could drop all of the objects in a chest or other place.
The github of the mod https://github.com/fnuecke/oc2
It's early in development, but I see in the source code it comes with some basic networking, with IPs, DHCPs and so on. I think it's possible to build real networks inside the game, or will be possible at some point. Can't wait to try it out later. Very exciting!
Does this enable programmable computers and programmable robots that have their own "agency" to work for you?
And on a related note: Are there other mods related to (learning) programming that can be used by kids (6-8yo)? I'm specifically looking for something to teach my daughter and it would be cool if she could do that inside a game she already knows how to control.
It runs at 1 Hz though, about 1000 times slower than an Atari 2600.
Redstone blocks vs redstone torches, and their relative strengths/purposes. Torches on sides of normal blocks with signals entering the side of the block. Using normal blocks to prevent redstone signals from connecting (particularly when going up or down stepped inclines). Space requirements to allow a signal to drive a block and not just terminate the signal next to a block.
These are all game analogues of laying out P and N state semiconductors, or conducting signals from one area of a chip to another and maintaining their signal quality, when designing ICs. Granted, these processes are hugely automated by tooling, but someone has to know, learn and understand how the materials science works in order to develop those tools.
This is why I'm surprised I've not yet seen a VHDL/Verilog compiler for minecraft redstone. Converting a gate array and netlist into a minecraft world feels like a relatively simple challenge for anyone with the knowledge, but I guess it's too niche of a project? Or I'm just not looking hard enough for it.
Calm down, it's just a building game where it happens that you can learn quite a bit about logic. I'd trying to get my 5 y.o. niece into it, since I find it to be a much better game for children compared to those pointless freemium mobile games.
Minecraft is fantastic for how simple it looks on the surface.
Years ago when I learned about networking at school, I built a WiFi mesh in Minecraft for example.
It's full blown Lua, albeit running on the imaginary computer inside Minecraft. You can write complex Lua programs, if you want to and know how, and they can cause say, your robot to fly around building things, or realise its battery is low and it should come back for more juice.
So yes.
[The Minecraft mod community has people come and go, and it's not at all uncommon for the idea behind a mod to long outlive the interest of the first person who implements it, so that both projects pass from one author to another and also new projects come along that do more or less the same thing but are being actively maintained while a previous project became moribund. Minecraft is great but it's not the whole world and people move on. So e.g. the vast number of different items in typical modded worlds are unwieldy with Minecraft's built in systems for crafting etc. but soon somebody invented "Too Many Items" a mod which provides an interactive interface to the list of all items. Successors have included: "Not Enough Items" (very famous) and "Just Enough Items" (popular today and so people just say e.g. "Recipe in JEI" and assume you'll know what they meant). OpenComputers II thus isn't as "inevitable" as something like Python 3 was where the existing maintainers are making another one, but it sounds like for your purposes the fact it's RISC-V isn't crucial so I'd stick with plain OpenComputers at least for now ]
OpenComputers is IMHO as a non-parent somewhat suitable for what you're talking about, but it really depends how much she likes Minecraft. The OpenComputers default is to give you a clunky Nano (I think) editor, if you love Minecraft you'll forgive that because hey it's inside Minecraft. But otherwise even at age six it might already be annoying that this text editor is so primitive, yet six year olds aren't going to have the patience to bootstrap themselves a full-blown Emacs, I don't have patience for that and I'm in my forties. So if that's becoming an obstacle, outweighing the fun of being inside Minecraft, a more conventional beginner's programming environment might be appropriate. (If it's just a minor annoyance it is possible to write code in a "real" editor on the big computer and copy-paste it into OpenComputers but I have not done that)
There are a few other mods that have ideas which are core to computing but don't directly teach programming, in particular Integrated Dynamics has some pretty fancy predicate building that feels to me like it would teach some fundamentals about logic and debugging logical systems (is there a Pig stood on this sensor? Is it a full-grown pig? Are there at least two other pigs in this pen? Then let's pick this pig up and send it to the other pen...), but it's not very near the start of ID's progression, so again if Minecraft isn't a big interest already she's unlikely to see the interesting bits before losing interest.
It is pretty easy to import code into OpenComputer once setup - see NIDAS https://github.com/S4mpsa/NIDAS
Vanilla Minecraft cows produce milk if you click them with a bucket to put the milk in. Convenient. Some packs though provide real cattle. You need a cow, and a bull, and they need to be together with plenty of good food, and then the cow becomes pregnant. So you wait until she gives birth, steal her calf and now you can get milk. Or, you can decide actually you don't need milk that badly and the cows should get on with their lives unmolested.
I don't entirely sympathise with the people who wrote Better Than Wolves, but, you know, their water powered machinery is probably better than wolves considering the effort that went into each feature...
> Many devices are so-called high level API (HLAPI) devices. This means they are not controlled using regular Linux drives, but via a simple RPC system, employing JSON messages over a serial device.
I'm currently working on calling the C fenv API using the new Java Foreign Function & Memory API, all from pure Java.
To be clear, I'm not the dev behind OC2, just messing with it as a hobbie.
Whether that's made it into this variant is unclear, I haven't messed around with it. In theory it should be possible though.
1. Download the mod and its dependencies from Curseforge (should be 3 JAR files: oc2[1], sedna[2] and markdown_manual[3])
2. Install MultiMC[4], run it and sign into your Minecraft/Microsoft account
3. Click the Add Instance button in the toolbar and choose Vanilla version 1.18.1, give it a name if you like and click OK
4. Click Edit Instance in the sidebar for the new instance
5. Click Install Forge on the right sidebar and select the latest version
6. Select Loader mods in the left sidebar
7. Click Add on the right and select the three JAR files you downloaded in step 1
8. Click Launch down the bottom
Usually it's simpler to install mods with MultiMC if they're already in a modpack, but these mods don't appear to be in one currently.
[1] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/oc2/files
[2] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/sedna/files
[3] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/markdownmanual/...
